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Monday, June 18, 2012

Funeral and the Twilight: They Put You in the Ground

Fittingly, Funeral & theTwilight's Benjamin
Jones practiced post death surgery and facial reconstruction prior to
helping craft F&T's dressed-down, macabre sound. Together with
Dave Bloxsom and Brandon Keegan, the Minneapolis three-piece crafts
haunting theme-music to your own horror epic. One classification that
I continually utilize is
"machete-rock"
-- one of those fantastically brutal apocalyptic convulsions that
choreograph the fantasy of a targeted murder spree.

Painstaking, irreverent and
indiscriminate, Funeral and the Twilight is like adding a fine wine
or polished shoes to the mood, making it more of a waltz than a
rampage. It's an eerily aggressive shredding of societal facades.
Jones' vocals offer a peculiar vibrato-hued scream, pulsing almost
counter to the off-beat melodies. Seriously beautiful stuff going on
here. Each song offers an open-ended tale that hunts for meaning
within the layered collage of images. It's angst-ridden at its own
impotence. Calling attention to the variety of fucked up things that
happen in the world, it realizes that any hope for salvation is an
immediate admittance of failure. This is what we are -- brutal,
bloody, violent, meaningless; yet, jettisoning the despair, we taste
joy and love. It's an open-eyed leap into the void, fully embracing
the reflection and hoping it shatters upon impact.

In their own words: "Jumped into
the Mississippi River to die, but still live years later and onward.
Punk as fuck."